Rantings from the Aaron Burr Cidery

Friday, December 5, 2014

The amount of media
focus we’ve received is flattering (and I’d like to think
a little warranted), but it’s important to share that attention with the hundreds of
small cideries recently opening and looking to use local apples in the
tradition that once made cider America’s community drink and nightly beverage.I point to Eric West’s “Cider Guide” map as a
source for finding the cideries nearest you.

But it’s important
to do your research!!! Not all cideries use local apples and very few abide by
the rules of nature which dictates the flavor of cider.It is the apple tree that dictates the
flavor and it should not be over-ruled by customer expectation (or the cider-maker's
guess for what the customer wants.) Therefore, it’s not possible to mass-produce real, traditional cider. Taste homogenization,
year-round product availability and shelf-stability are the very things which brought inanimate drinks (like mass-market beers and wines) to fore-front. Cost is not the main issue, it is knowledge. Without your knowledge we cider-makers stand on the other side of a wall.

Again, you must do
your research. You must understand the life-cycle of the apple tree, the
process of fermentation, and your responsibility in keeping a live beverage
in proper storage. And then you must communicate
with the producers.Yes, that’s
work.Does that sound unreasonable? I’m
sorry, but if you want accountability, accessibility, and transparency then there
is no other way.Same goes for wine. If I’m the first to challenge you on
this issue then something’s wrong. I’m
telling you the truth about how real cider (and wine) is made, and anyone who doesn’t disclose where they got the fruit and how they process it is keeping you on the other side of the wall for a good reason.It’s time to take back real cider.It’s not up to the cider-makers alone.It’s up to you as well.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Ideally cider will
emerge with a true distinction for “micro,” since the word has become utterly
meaningless amongst beer producers. (A
producer of 200,000 gallons per year classifies himself as a
"micro-brewer," when, for the record, even if a
brewer makes 10,000 gallons per year he-or-she is already employing economy-of-scale measures that are a corner-cutter's slippery
slope away from “medium sized.”)
But I digress. We want true micro-cideries because we want
someone- anyone- to make a product that is done the way it should be done: no compromises, no
hurry.

I can make a sound argument as to why true mom-and-pop cideries
are better for health, social, moral,
ecological, and economic reasons but for now let me endorse 5 cideries in the
northeast all committed to making the highest quality cider at or below 2000
gallons per year. These are people making cider at that scale not because they are “starting-out”, but because cider is part of a whole homestead. (Note:
some excellent ciders are made in the 2,000 to 10,000 gallon range but they are
more accurately termed "small producer", not "micro.")
Without further ado:

The first cidery I visited in 2008 and still an inspiration
to me. Sebastian, originally from the UK, grows organic apples and does
everything himself in a corner of his old barn.The Cyders are dry, sophisticated, and I recall farm and oak notes that are
appropriate to his English upbringing.

Steve and Jen Gougeon also grow their apples organically and
produce quintessential American wild yeast ciders.Cloudy, sometimes farmy, but also bright and vivacious,
the ciders are literally produced in the home basement.

Doug Finke has had unusual apple varieties in the ground for
a very long time and his son, Adam, honors the trees by keeping many batches
single-variety.They are not organic but
a purist vein runs through them, they are the only ones in the Hudson Valley,
if not NY, making a full diversity of single-variety ciders, many at the
carboy scale.

No one better illustrates mom-and-pop cider than Jason and Lauren
MacArthur fermenting in the basement in their modest self-built home.Gallon-per-gallon they observe an enormous
amount of focus on each blend resulting in quality simply unmatchable at a
larger scale.

Eric Shatt and Deva Maas have an extensive background in
ag-science and wine making, but their Red Byrd Cider is clearly the work of joy.Again, at their scale they are free to
experiment and one of the most sophisticated and interesting ciders I ever tasted
was from wild apples Eric foraged in 2013.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Unlike most farmers,
for wine and cider makers the season does not conclude at harvest. In fact, the collection of fruit is just the
halfway point in a season that extends 12 months or more. Think of the harvest like the caterpillar/
butterfly cocoon stage, cider emerges in a different form but the new
appearance is the extension of the same life. That said, we annually release our crop
report in the spring rather than the fall because the winter affects this new
life form just as much as the summer influences the apple.

The 2013 year for
apples here in the northeast will be remembered as a year of plenty. An average weather season start-to-finish saw
no significant frost damage, no setbacks from cicadas (as was expected) or
other pests, the heat spell of July did not couple with humidity and we dodged
a blight year, and the fast fall of September reversed course in October
extending the season slightly later than usual.
This last part was welcome news for farmers because it took a long time
to harvest the near record quantities of apples during this “on-year”, which
was doubly bountiful a year after 2012’s decimating frost. (Apple trees which are naturally biennial and
triennial but they respond to reproductive interruptions like frost by
putting out greater fruit quantities at their next opportunity.) The pear crop was the exact opposite. Pears survived the 2012 frost and produced a
full crop the that year, and in turn, they
took 2013 off to recover. We foraged 6
bushels of wild pears compared to 220 bushels wild apples.

That’s the
apples. The cider, on the other hand,
was adversely affected by the warm spell of October. The early apples fermented too quickly and
they will not play a significant roll in the blends, save for their tannic or
acidic properties. But the late apples
were set-up perfectly by a frigid late autumn/ early winter. The cellar temperature was a perfect 55
degrees December 21st and it slowly dropped at the ideal rate corresponding the sugar-to-alcohol conversion. The
ciders pressed in November and December reached 90% dryness and stopped
fermenting in February when the cellar hit 48.
Now in March it is at 45. We have
never fermented in consistently frigid winter such as this, temperatures in
each of the 4 winter months have been below zero, and the ciders have yet to clear and finish. We hope for cosmetic reasons the turbidity
breaks with the spring warm up, but if it does not clear we can say with sincerity that this unique vintage has found a visual way to express the season.